The document discusses how reputation and gossip can help explain cooperation in human societies through social control mechanisms. It outlines how reputation involves reported evaluations of others' character and how gossip allows spreading these evaluations indirectly at low cost, which provides incentives for participation in social control and optimizes the identification of non-cooperators while reducing retaliation risks. Ethnographic examples from various small-scale societies show how gossip typically involves vague or indefinite sources and targets to avoid reprisals.